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Alex Blumberg of Gimlet Media

Jan 22, 2020·0 visitors

Alex Blumberg

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Jan 22, 2020

MouthMedia Network · 5:05 PM

The following conversation is an excerpt from a podcast interview with Alex Blumberg, Founder of Gimlet Media on the Million Dollar Mind podcast. You can scroll to read more of the conversation or click through to the full podcast episode.

Alex Blumberg · 5:07 PM

There's all different kinds of media, and every media is specifically good at certain things. In terms of information density, there's nothing better than the written word. You can just get across so much. In terms of spectacle, there's nothing better than film, the moving image.

Alex Blumberg · 5:11 PM

Audio is great at emotional intimacy and if you're going to have a career in audio you start to recognize that. The subjects you're interviewing, you start to recognize when they're being actually honest, you start to be able to hear it because you know the audience can hear it.

Julia Pimsleur · 11:38 PM

One of the things that I think about a lot is reinvention, because these days very few people go get a job, stay in that job or even stay in that career. You've reinvented yourself a few times. We've known each other since the '90s, I've reinvented myself a bunch of times.

Alex Blumberg · 11:39 PM

I know. We met each other in 1990 or something like that?n

Julia Pimsleur · 11:39 PM

Yeah, 1990.n

Alex Blumberg · 11:41 PM

No, I know, you saw me at my most callow and unformed and ridiculous 20 something...

Julia Pimsleur · 11:42 PM

Well, fortunately I have a terrible memory. I'm curious to do your journey a little bit and think about, you've already been interviewed a lot about the external, we know the facts. You were at This American Life for 20 years working with Ira Glass.

Julia Pimsleur · 11:42 PM

You got this incredible training, then went out on your own, started Gimlet, recently sold that to Spotify, congratulations.n

Alex Blumberg · 11:42 PM

Thank you.

Julia Pimsleur · 11:43 PM

Each of those Alex's, I've seen at least four Alex's in that. There was the kid in Chicago I met who was living with four roommates and trying to figure it all out and I want to go back there.n

Alex Blumberg · 11:43 PM

Dating your best friend.

Julia Pimsleur · 11:43 PM

Dating my best friend. Hey Katie, hope you're listening. Then there's the Alex who was working with Ira, the Alex who launched Gimlet. Just take me through some of those if you don't mind, and let's start in Chicago. What were you doing that summer? I can't remember.

Alex Blumberg · 11:44 PM

Yeah. I'm trying to think how many careers I've had, it's at least four, and I have always thought of myself as a very late bloomer. It took me a long time to figure out even what I wanted my career to be. In Chicago I was... I've graduated from college, I had studied Russian.

Alex Blumberg · 11:44 PM

The one marketable skill I had, and I guess marketable is in air quotes, was that I spoke Russian and I didn't have any other real skills.

Alex Blumberg · 11:45 PM

I worked at a social service agency helping Russian refugees settle in Chicago. That was my first job, and your best friend and my girlfriend, Katie worked at another social service agency working with Vietnamese refugees-

Julia Pimsleur · 11:45 PM

I remember that.

Alex Blumberg · 11:46 PM

...and we would trade stories about that. I had a little office and my clients would come in and I would help them with their resumes and they would talk to me in Russian about what they were good at, and I would try to translate that into the American job market.

Alex Blumberg · 11:46 PM

I would just coach them for how to get a job. It was a brand new experience, because they came from Soviet Russia where you were graduated and then handed a job and that was it.

Julia Pimsleur · 11:47 PM

You probably heard some pretty interesting stories too, of people who left Russia and moved to America.

Alex Blumberg · 11:47 PM

I did. There was a lot of narratives that I heard. There was a lot of classic narratives of they were all Jewish refugees because it was hard to get a job. It's hard to get the job you want. There was a Jewish ceiling inside Soviet Russia.

Julia Pimsleur · 11:47 PM

That is shocking that in the '90s that would be a thing in a nation.n

Alex Blumberg · 11:47 PM

Yeah. You had on your passport it was like, "Russian" "Latvian" "Lithuanian" all the Soviet republics and then Jewish was a thing that you put on your passport.

Julia Pimsleur · 11:47 PM

I didn't realize that.

Alex Blumberg · 11:48 PM

Yeah. It wasn't violent, but it was you're just kept out of certain things.

Julia Pimsleur · 11:48 PM

So you're working with Russian refugees, helping them fix up their resumes, did you have any massive career plan in mind? Like, "I want to go tell stories and make media or...?

Alex Blumberg · 11:48 PM

No. I was a lover of long form journalism. I read The New Yorker every week and I read Harper's magazine, which was a big magazine back then and I loved that stuff. My heroes were geeky writers for The New Yorker.n

Alex Blumberg · 11:49 PM

I remember Malcolm Gladwell's first article in The New Yorker. I remember where I was when I read it. That was the thing, and David Remnick and all these people, they were my heroes and so I was a big fan of all that stuff.

Alex Blumberg · 11:51 PM

But I never in a million years thought that I could even have that kind of career. I don't know why it felt so impossible for me, a relatively upper middle class Jewish kid from Cincinnati... It must be even harder for people who feel even more alienated from the power structure.

Julia Pimsleur · 11:51 PM

What was your identity? Were you an advocate? I thought maybe you were going to be like, "I was always a story teller." You weren't a storyteller.

Alex Blumberg · 11:51 PM

No. I was trying to figure it out. I was just mostly just trying to-n

Julia Pimsleur · 11:51 PM

You were just like a kid.n

Alex Blumberg · 11:52 PM

Yeah, I didn't have an identity. I think my identity, if anything was a little bit like, "I'm not the kind of person who has an identity. I'm not going to strive, striving is not cool."

Julia Pimsleur · 11:52 PM

Anti-achieving.n

Alex Blumberg · 11:52 PM

Yeah. I think for a lot of people who have an anti-achievement facade, it's just masking a deep desire to achieve and a fear of failure if you try. I think that was me.

Julia Pimsleur · 11:52 PM

How did you make your way to New York?n

Alex Blumberg · 11:52 PM

Well New York was a long way away basically. Then I got another job as a teacher. I was a teacher for a long time and as a teacher I eventually was like, I got an internship in media, I got an internship at a magazine in New York while I was still in Chicago during my summer.

Julia Pimsleur · 11:52 PM

Were you teaching middle school, high school?n

Alex Blumberg · 11:53 PM

I was teaching middle school science actually. I didn't move to New York for another decade. I was in Chicago for 12 years. My big turning point was getting the job at This American Life, which was the big step in my career. I feel like I got to understand how kids brains work.

Alex Blumberg · 11:54 PM

I felt like I was pretty cool, going to college I was a pretty cool guy or whatever. Like I had something to offer, but the kids at that age, they don't care at all about you. If you're not in middle-school with them right now, their social thing, they can't even pay attention.

Alex Blumberg · 11:55 PM

I remember feeling like the adults in Charlie Brown. The kids who were younger I think pay a lot more attention to adults and then once you get into high school you can start to pay a little bit more attention to adults, but middle school in particular, I think-

Julia Pimsleur · 11:55 PM

It sounds like being a middle school teacher is the New York song. "If you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere." You can survive being a middle school science teacher, you can make stories and share them with the world.

Alex Blumberg · 11:55 PM

I guess so yeah.

Julia Pimsleur · 11:55 PM

That was your first audience, Alex.n

Alex Blumberg · 11:56 PM

I never actually put it together until you just said that, but I think that's true. Trying to figure out how to retain the attention of a group of 12, 13 and 14-year-olds is a really good training for trying to retain anybody's attention and trying to keep it exciting and moving.

Alex Blumberg · 11:56 PM

Especially when you're talking about science. Later in my career as a journalist, that was how I made my name, explaining very, very complicated topics on the radio and in podcasts, and I think being a middle school science teacher was my first shot at that.

Alex Blumberg · 11:56 PM

Julia Pimsleur · 11:58 PM

Right. I'm also thinking of another parallel of, and you just have to show up every day and bring it, right? Even if they're rolling their eyes and I have kids about that age so there's a lot of, “Whatever mom" and you just still have to bring it. That probably is the training.

Alex Blumberg · 11:59 PM

Yeah you do. You have to basically pretend that you're getting the feedback because you are, it's important the things do stay in their brains. They do need your love. They do need your attention even if they don't show you. You just have to fake it till you make it a little bit.

Julia Pimsleur · 11:59 PM

Here's my question. The morning you woke up and you were like, "Okay, I'm going to go meet with Ira Glass and try to get this job." What was that day like?

Alex Blumberg · 12:00 AM

There was no interview. I remember I pitched them a ton of stories. I remember there was... Somehow people who worked there knew the way it worked enough to know that you needed to pitch them story ideas. I was just like, "Okay, I'm just going to pitch a bunch of story ideas."

Julia Pimsleur · 12:00 AM

Did they take any?n

Alex Blumberg · 12:01 AM

No, because they were awful. I remember one in particular, this is the most embarrassing one that I remember is like, I had this whole document and the theme of This American Life is that they pick a theme and then they choose a bunch of stories on that theme.

Alex Blumberg · 12:02 AM

I cleverly arranged my... Which I now know is not the way they do it at all, but in my pitch I was like, I pitched the whole show and then all the stories that were part of the show...

Julia Pimsleur · 12:02 AM

You were like, "I'm going to make it easy for you."n

Alex Blumberg · 12:02 AM

I'm going to make it easy, I got the whole show worked out, and I had a whole bunch of them. The one that I remember that is the most cringy is I was like, I had a show that was called Flowers from the Dead Earth, which was I thought a line from a T. S. Elliot poem.

Alex Blumberg · 12:03 AM

I actually went back and looked up the poem and it's actually Lilacs Out Of The Dead Land. I got-

Julia Pimsleur · 12:03 AM

You got the flower part, right?n

Alex Blumberg · 12:03 AM

Yeah, I got two words out of the six.

Julia Pimsleur · 12:03 AM

You were a science teacher you should have been able to get the right flower.

Alex Blumberg · 12:04 AM

Then I wanted to do, one of the stories was community gardens. I want to do a community gardens story, which, now I realize is the height of the cliché, I don't know what I wanted to say about community gardens.

Julia Pimsleur · 12:04 AM

So they gave you the middle school cold shoulder?

Alex Blumberg · 12:04 AM

They were, "No." But I think there was something about the moxie, the sheer volume that I did.

Alex Blumberg · 12:05 AM

And I think they were just desperate. I think Ira had started the show and he had two producers and they were coming out weekly and it was just insane. He has an insane work ethic and so they just needed people.

Alex Blumberg · 12:05 AM

So he was like, "Can we throw you this thing?" Eventually, I think he got a little bit of money and he hired an assistant and so he said, "Will you be my assistant?" That's how I basically started becoming the administrative assistant.n

Julia Pimsleur · 12:06 AM

What was the mindset shift from going from being freelancer, teacher, trying to figure my life out to, okay, now I'm the assistant to arguably one of the biggest names in public radio?

Alex Blumberg · 12:06 AM

Well, the mindset happened a little bit earlier on. My longtime girlfriend in Chicago broke up with me and that was just... It just totally disrupted my life. It was one of the most painful things I've ever been through.

Alex Blumberg · 12:06 AM

Now I'm very, very grateful that I went through that because it was really important for me and it was important to understand, but it was really painful. It was the first time I had my heart broken, but it taught me so many things.

Alex Blumberg · 12:07 AM

One of the things It taught me was that I had been living life in a very cowardly way, trying to just protect myself from bad things happening and then this bad thing happened anyway.

Alex Blumberg · 12:08 AM

That freed me a little bit to be like, "Well, if bad things are going to happen anyway, you might as well go for what you want." That was the mindset that I was now having as the administrative assistant. I was 30 years old, I was a teacher, I was making $20,000 a year.

Julia Pimsleur · 12:08 AM

You weren't living the dream.n

Alex Blumberg · 12:09 AM

I was not living the dream and this was the only thing that felt like it could lead anywhere. So I was just like, “I'm going to really, really try." It was the first time in my life I think that I had really let myself just wholeheartedly try for something that I really wanted.

Julia Pimsleur · 12:09 AM

Did you get any external help? Like did you read books? Did you talk to mentors or was it really just on the job trying to rise to the occasion?n

Alex Blumberg · 12:10 AM

It was on the job trying to rise to the occasion and I think there was something about it. It felt very good. I was in grad school and I had a part time job at the grad school and part time job at This American Life during which I got to sit in on story meetings.

Alex Blumberg · 12:10 AM

It was just this big meeting where you discuss what are we going to put on the show and you're kicking around ideas and you're discussing plot points and story ideas. Then I was working with this regional planning commission as part of my graduate program.

Alex Blumberg · 12:11 AM

Just the difference between the two experiences, being the administrative assistant for This American Life was so much more compelling to me than being in my field that I was studying and I was just so much more compelled by being the administrative assistant. I was finally-

Julia Pimsleur · 12:12 AM

In the right place doing what you wanted to be doing.n

Alex Blumberg · 12:12 AM

...31 years old or 32 years old, I was finally in the right place.n

Julia Pimsleur · 12:20 AM

Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming in. This is great and good to catch up.

Alex Blumberg · 12:21 AM

Yes. Thank you.n

Julia Pimsleur · 12:21 AM

And relive some good times too.n

Alex Blumberg · 12:21 AM

Yeah.n

Julia Pimsleur · 12:21 AM

Thanks so much for listening and stay brave and go big.n

MouthMedia Network · 12:22 AM

This has been an excerpt from a podcast interview with Alex Blumberg on Million Dollar Mind podcast. For the full interview, click through to the podcast site.